Who says Islam has no sense of humor?

(Thanks to Ron G.)

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Hague crimes

Every evening, plainsclothes police officers escort two members of the Dutch Parliament to armored cars and take them to hiding places for the night.  One of them, Geert Wilders, has been camping out in a cell in a high-security prison where his life, he said, has become "like a bad B movie."  His colleague, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has grown increasingly miserable sleeping on a military base.

From Marlise Simons' New York Times article, headlined "2 Dutch Deputies on the Run, From Jihad Death Threat."

Can we talk?  I visited Amsterdam exactly once, during my post-college Grand Tour in the 1970s, and found myself surprisingly uncomfortable.  Oh, the people were fine, the food good, the beer plentiful--rather, it was the air of permissiveness that unnerved me.  The smug acceptance of drugs and prostitution, the alleyways filled with young people crouched over bongs, the self-congratulatory sense among the Dutch that they had moved beyond the shoebuckled Puritanism of America to discover the pure joy of harmless hedonism.  Oh yes, and the consensus among all young hipsters of the day that of course the Netherlanders were right:  hadn't Sigmund Freud, Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse taught us that civilization was constructed on a foundation of repressed instinct and desire?

At the time, I was no stranger to gratified instinct and desire.  Still, I kept thinking, when everything is permitted, nothing has meaning.  When sin becomes validated as virtue, it loses its delicious power to entrance, enthrall and enhance the good.  Too much sympathy for the Devil, and we simply invite him into our homes.

I wonder if we're not seeing this take place in the Netherlands today.  A complacent society, convinced that the ease and convenience of toleration is in fact its virtue, has evidently lost its ability to draw distinctions, make value judgments, say no.  Instead, it imprisons its own people as criminals, grants the criminals the rights of free citizens, and expresses its rage in impotent acts of vandalism.  The murder of one filmmaker has triggered more anti-Muslim violence in that tiny country that the slaughter of 3,000 people did in ours.  Why is that?  Could it be because we have an infuriating habit of making moral judgments?  That the oppressive shades of our Puritan ancestors still whisper to us the difference between good and bad, harmless and harmful?  And that true forbearance begins when a society obeys its own instincts for right and wrong, rather than suppress them in a fuzzy multiculturalism that cannot disguise its inability to defend itself?  How foolish we Americans are.

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Arrests made in  the Armanious family murder case.

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U.S. troops shoot and wound freed Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena on her way to the Baghdad airport.

Evidently, an Italian secret service agent who negotiated her freedom was killed.